About Docker Engine

Estimated reading time:
3 minutes

Develop, Ship and Run Any Application, Anywhere

Docker is a platform for developers and sysadmins
to develop, ship, and run applications. Docker lets you quickly assemble
applications from components and eliminates the friction that can come when
shipping code. Docker lets you get your code tested and deployed into production
as fast as possible.

Docker consists of:

The Docker Engine - our lightweight and powerful open source containerization
technology combined with a work flow for building and containerizing your
applications.

Why Docker?

Faster delivery of your applications

We want your environment to work better. Docker containers,
and the work flow that comes with them, help your developers,
sysadmins, QA folks, and release engineers work together to get your code
into production and make it useful. We’ve created a standard
container format that lets developers care about their applications
inside containers while sysadmins and operators can work on running the
container in your deployment. This separation of duties streamlines and
simplifies the management and deployment of code.

We make it easy to build new containers, enable rapid iteration of
your applications, and increase the visibility of changes. This
helps everyone in your organization understand how an application works
and how it is built.

Docker containers are lightweight and fast! Containers have
sub-second launch times, reducing the cycle
time of development, testing, and deployment.

Deploy and scale more easily

Docker containers run (almost) everywhere. You can deploy
containers on desktops, physical servers, virtual machines, into
data centers, and up to public and private clouds.

Since Docker runs on so many platforms, it’s easy to move your
applications around. You can easily move an application from a
testing environment into the cloud and back whenever you need.

Docker’s lightweight containers also make scaling up and
down fast and easy. You can quickly launch more containers when
needed and then shut them down easily when they’re no longer needed.

Get higher density and run more workloads

Docker containers don’t need a hypervisor, so you can pack more of
them onto your hosts. This means you get more value out of every
server and can potentially reduce what you spend on equipment and
licenses.

Faster deployment makes for easier management

As Docker speeds up your work flow, it gets easier to make lots
of small changes instead of huge, big bang updates. Smaller
changes mean reduced risk and more uptime.

Installation guides

Docker user guide

To learn about Docker in more detail and to answer questions about usage and
implementation, check out the Docker User Guide.

Release notes

A summary of the changes in each release in the current series can now be found
on the separate Release Notes page

Feature Deprecation Policy

As changes are made to Docker there may be times when existing features
need to be removed or replaced with newer features. Before an existing
feature is removed it is labeled as “deprecated” within the documentation
and remains in Docker for at least 3 stable releases. After that time it may be
removed.

Users are expected to take note of the list of deprecated features each
release and plan their migration away from those features, and (if applicable)
towards the replacement features as soon as possible.